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What does Bob Barr have to say about the latest debate? “Booorrrrrinngggg!” But then, I knew that ahead of time and did not even bother to follow either it or any of the predictable coverage and pontification about nothing. If you are interested in Bob’s take on the DC feeding frenzy, you can go here to listen. October 9th, 2008 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I’m at the point I was at a month ago: the two tickets consist one one old guy who frankly should have been put to pasture, two leftist asshats who belong in prison, and a lady who’s the only one of the four who’s worth a damn – Commenter Sunfish. October 9th, 2008 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
Both candidates supported the contemptible bailout. Indeed Senator McCain made a special point of supporting a Federal buy up of mortgages so that “people could pay at the new values and stay in their homes”. As the securities which the United States government is buying up are based on mortgages this is at least “logical” I suppose. However, there were economic policy differences: Senator Obama told some truly absurd lies, for example he claimed he would cut more spending than he would increase (in reality he would increase Federal government spending by close to a trillion Dollars on top of the various bailouts), and Senator Obama also repeated his lie about cutting taxes for 95% of the population – a lie because he treats welfare payments as ‘tax cuts’. But I found the differences on health care policy most interesting. Senator Obama denounced the very idea of buying health cover over State lines – competition is evil and would allow wicked places to attract business by having less regulation “as Delaware does with insurance and credit cards” perhaps Senator Obama should tell Senator Biden how evil the State of Delaware is. Clearly the chance of competition being allowed to reduced health costs under a President Obama is zero. Instead there are to be mandates and regulations. given the absurd notion that lack of regulation, rather than credit bubble finance and the government backing of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and ACORN, is the source of all of America’s problems… with fines to make small business enterprises give health cover to their employees. Senator Obama refused to say what size these fines on individuals and business enterprises would be. October 8th, 2008 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is a good, very fair-minded take on the current financial turmoil and all the more impressive for its insights precisely because the writer is not some sort of ultra-free market ideologue:
Absolutely. China, and the massive pool of savings that Asian economies have been able to provide to Western borrowers, is the 800 pound gorilla in the room in the current saga. The author continues:
Yep, Mr Greenspan has a lot to explain.
Try telling that to the likes of Will Hutton.
Quite. In recent years, I have often heard fellow libertarians say something on the lines that “we’ve won the economic argument but lost the cultural one” sort of thing. I have never been entirely convinced about that. Yes, old-style central planning and crushingly high tax rates are unlikely to make a comback, but never underestimate the age-old hatred of financiers, of speculators and great wealth. Those of us who might imagine that the big battle of ideas fought after the war against socialism have been won may want to shake off some complacency. But maybe I am being gloomy. After all, much of the current round of government “rescues” are not quite of the same order as the nationalisations of the past. And in some cases, we might hope that eventually states will return banks they have nationalised into private hands. As the French example of Credit Lyonnais shows – a corrupt bank if ever there was one – state-run banks are just as capable of making a mess of lending as any private one. October 8th, 2008 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Over the last week I kept running across articles and video about a heavy weight couple who lost weight after the embarrassment of being asked to move to a different seat so the airplane could take off safely. On one Fox News show the talking heads went on about the times they were asked to move. None of them were particularly large so they talked overly long about how a jumbo jet could be unsafe to fly because a mere wisp of a talking headess was in the wrong seat. This riled me a bit and has been roiling about in the back of my mind for some days. The people who write or talk about these things are supposedly educated, but the level of ignorance shown makes me very worried about what schools are actually requiring students to learn, even at the university level. In hopes some of these ignorant but otherwise intelligent folk happen to drop by Samizdata, I will provide a bit of a remedial lesson in basic physics and a bit on aeroplanes as well. I am hoping everyone is at least familiar with what a lever is, or at the very least a childhood teeter-totter. If two children sit on a board on opposite ends, they can find a balance point regardless of how fat or skinny the two are. One can move closer to the fulcrum, the thing upon which the board rests, or farther away. A child of a given weight at a given distance from the fulcrum creates what is known as a torque. The two children can balance these torques: Mass of child 1 times distance from fulcrum = Mass of child 2 times distance from fulcrum. In more typical notation: m1 * d1 = m2 * d2. If you understand a teeter-totter, you can understand everything else I have to say. An aeroplane has a number of points that are of interest. The most important to this discussion are the ‘center of lift’ and the ‘center of gravity’. If you had a very hefty jack and the underside of your 747 could handle it without a requirement for body work afterwards, a single point at which the aircraft could balance like a toy on a pencil is the center of gravity. This is just like the balance point of the children, but with the entire class and their teddy bears instead. The fulcrum is the center of lift. This is a balance point created by the airflow over the surfaces of the plane in flight. Ideally, and in the simple case, the center of lift should be near the center of mass and both should be on the center line of the aeroplane. If one wing were longer than the other, the center of lift would shift away from the center line. This would not be a good thing unless you are Burt Rutan and know how to do tricky things which no normal mortal would think of doing. In practice it is impossible to get the two exactly together. If the center of lift is forward of the cg the airplane will want to pitch up. If it is aft of the cg it will try to pitch down. Similarly if it is to the right or left of the cg. the airplane will want to roll right or left. You can control the attitude of the aeroplane by neutralizing these forces. If you have a pitch up tendency, you dial in a bit of pitch down on the elevator trim tabs. Likewise for the other directions. In worst case you can use the control column and use deflection of the elevator or ailerons themselves to counteract the problem. It is not wise to fly like this under normal circumstances. If you run out of trim you have either not done your weight and balance papers properly or you are flying a Lancaster to Europe in WWII with a max bomb and fuel load and expect you are going to die anyway. Airplanes have a bunch of numbers which pilots have to know. Among them are the ‘aft cg limit’ and the ‘forward cg limit’. Basically these mean you are too tail heavy or nose heavy to fly with enough of a safety margin to deal with the unexpected. They are not absolute limits. You are not going to reach the ‘my god we are all going to die!’ limit unless everyone piles into the tail and the pilot can not keep the nose down even with full downward elevator deflection. Inside the cabin the pilot has readings off the landing gear that tell him what the weight and balance looks like after all the luggage, consumables and passengers are on board. If those indicators show the aeroplane is approaching the aft limit he or she will have a flight attendant pick someone from far aft and move them as far forward as possible. That is all this whole storm in a teacup story was about. It is standard aviation practice that goes back to the first time Wilbur took Orville along with him. October 7th, 2008 | 45 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have started reading The $12 Million Stuffed Shark by economist Don Thompson, and it mentions (on page 11 of my 2008 hardback edition) an episode I vaguely remember:
I googled this Boisvert character, but found nothing else except this one episode. I guess there is bourgeois respectability, in the form of lots of things that the imaginary bourgeoisie are imagined still to take seriously and to get outraged about, which art has traded on by treading on for over a century. And then there is actual respectability, the outraging of which causes the actual bourgeoisie – the sort that likes, exhibits in galleries, and buys contemporary art rather than being outraged by it – to want nothing to do with you on account of you being just too much trouble. More generally, I am reading the book quoted above because I find myself wanting to know more about the phenomenon of Modern Art/Contemporary Art (Thompson says Modern is before 1970 and Contemporary is after 1970). My first thought is that what caused and causes Modern Art etc. – what is Modern art – is complicated, and that there is no one thing that can explain it or describe it properly. See my cascade of self-commenting here, which was where I first blogged about Thompson’s book. The rise of photography and then of the cinema and television, the rise of and nature of the modern news media, the demoralisation afflicting European culture as a result of the World Wars, WW1 in particular, the Baby Boom and its serial obsessions, lots of new money, etc. etc. etc. … there are many reasons why the visual arts in the twentieth century and since have turned out the way they have. The temptation to reduce Modern Art and all its works to one particular sort of annoyingness – modern art is nothing but … !! – is, well, very tempting. But such temptation should be resisted, because whichever single cause you choose is just not going to be the whole story. It would not be true, for instance, to say that Contemporary Art, or Modern Art, is only about winding people up and getting lots of outraged publicity, although of course that definitely is part of the story. But, all comments on the above ruminations will be most welcome to me, even foolishly reductive single cause comments, but citing single causes which I had not thought about before. Just now, my personal favourite contributory cause of Modern/Contemporary Art (because so often neglected in amongst all the complaints about dead sharks) is the demand for quiet spaces which one may visit without being bombarded with multiple advertising messages and reminders of one’s disappointing place in the rat race, and where one may consort with other rats who likewise don’t like to be reminded of their insufficiently ratlike ratness all the time, for example by portraits of self-important rat race winners of the past. But all this without having to doff one’s cap to a religion that one does not believe in. If that’s your problem, an art gallery adorned with blank canvasses, or canvasses consisting of big coloured rectangular blobs, could be just what you want. Which means that the very same art objects which outrage some with their meaninglessness can simultaneously soothe others, with that very same meaninglessness. October 7th, 2008 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
I just received this note in private email from a fellow board member of the National Space Society:
So if you are one of our readers who happens to be well to the south in Europe, please do report back if you see anything a couple hours from now. I will be watching for videos to show up in blogs and the big outlets. We can all be very, very happy it is only a couple meters in diameter…. this time. Note: The email seemed to indicate today; the only article I have found elsewhere so far seems to indicate last night. I am still looking… October 7th, 2008 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Government consistently works to undermine trust in other institutions in order to build its power. That is calculated to increase anxiety, and dependency on the state. It is a sort of reverse confidence trick. The ordinary con-man creates a false relationship of trust, and lets you believe he has something you actually want. The key political trick is, to create false suspicion in order to make you seek a “safety” you never really needed. Now governments that have spent a decade or more telling the public to be very, very afraid, that it is helpless and needs more powerful government to save it, are very ill-adapted to deal with a loss of confidence in the financial markets. They seem to grasp dimly that stopping a panic ought to be the aim, but their approach to stopping a panic is to appear on television for emergency announcements that the situation is uniquely grave and unpredictable and so government is now going to be doing big arbitrary things inconsistently and without warning. If they wanted calm resolution from others, then demonstrating it themselves might be a good way to start. But they don’t know how. October 7th, 2008 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Instead of thinking of the pending bailouts and financial regulation as a new era of government supervisions of markets, think of it as preserving the system in which a Harvard elite controls other people’s money. In fact, very little is likely to change. Reading the news stories about how Secretary Paulson plans to implement the bailout, it seems as though the same people will be in charge of the money. Print some new business cards, change the logo on the front from “Goldman Sachs” to “U.S. Treasury,” and everything else continues as it was. It’s just that it becomes a lot more difficult for ordinary people to opt out of using the elite’s money management services.” – Arnold Kling. He is not exactly a fan of the US financial bailout. October 7th, 2008 | Comments are closed
People sometimes say they wish the politicians would get together and agree, instead of bickering and arguing. I wish the politicians and political parties would disagree more about the issues, so that actions and policies can be properly tested and choices evaluated. Consensus often breeds the worst errors. October 6th, 2008 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
William Rees-Mogg wonders, in his Times (of London) column today, whether Barack Obama has it in him to be the next FDR. I sincerely hope not. Let us consider the following data on unemployment rates during the 1930s: 1930: 8.7% (Source: US Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States, as quoted by Thomas J. Lorenzo, in “How Capitalism Saved America, page 180-181), With a set of figures like that, perhaps it is no wonder that hagiographers of FDR prefer to focus more on his record as a war leader these days. If Obama does share any of FDR’s traits for sheer deviousness on the economic front, we have trouble on our hands. It is amazing how certain myths persist. Back in the early 1980s, when I was doing my history A-levels, one of my teachers gave me the whole ‘heroic’ portrait of FDR. I suspect this is still the default position of most history textbooks today. October 6th, 2008 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
Plans have been unveiled to construct an incredibly tall skyscraper in the Gulf. One has to admire the sheer brio of the project, even if, at a time of global economic worries, such a project smacks of possible financial hubris. The region’s oil wealth may last a while yet and Dubai has taken strides in making itself less dependent on the stuff, but I do wonder what will happen in say, 10 or 20 years’ time if, for any reason, the oil revenues seriously go into decline. Even so, it says a lot about how strong modern building materials now are that such a building is even thinkable. October 6th, 2008 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
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